About

I am a journalist and writer interested in history and literature. I try to belie Evelyn Waugh’s characterisation of journalists as being those with ‘visible means of support but no fixed occupation’, in Scoop, his send-up of foreign correspondents.

Below is an overview about me. For more details about my career and education, see:

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Awards and grants

As a journalist, I have won awards for my reportage, essay writing and work as an editor.

  • During my time as a reporter in The Independent, Mumbai, I won a Goethe Institut scholarship in 1993, on which I studied advanced German in Berlin and reported on developments after the country was reunified. Among other pleasures, I got a kick out of being able to read Karl Marx’s ‘The Communist Manifesto’ and Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ in the original.
  • For my work in The Independent, I was the runner-up of two finalists for the 1995 Dhiren Bhagat Award for young journalists.
  • During my time as The Statesman’s correspondent for western India, based in Mumbai, I received the 1996 Chevening Award for Young Journalists, granted by the British government to early-career Indians, during which I spent a several months in London (and a couple of weeks in Paris, but unlike George Orwell, I was not down and out in either city.)
  • I contributed the main report to and anchored a package of stories in the Hindustan Times that won the Ramnath Goenka Award for Spot Reporting in 2009, for coverage of the terrorist attack on Mumbai in November the previous year.
  • I was the managing editor of Scroll.in, founded in 2013-2014, which won the Red Ink award for Excellence in Journalism in 2015 for News Start-up of the Year.
  • I won the Red Ink Award in 2016 for an essay on Hindustani music that appeared in The Caravan magazine.
  • Three other articles of mine made it to the shortlists for the Red Ink Award in 2016 and 2017.

As a writer, I received (visible) support for working on The Secret Master, as described below (and plenty from behind the scenes that was equally valuable).

Other interests

I am a student of Hindustani vocal music. My current guru is the wonderful khayal singer and thinker as well as prolific teacher and composer, Arun Kashalkar, the protagonist of my book, The Secret Master, who combines three gharanas, or styles: Gwalior, Agra and Jaipur. I grew up surrounded by Carnatic music, but began my training in Indian music by learning the Hindustani classical flute, eventually moving to vocal music. Indeed, of all music genres, khayal is what moves me the most. Other pursuits also (physically) move me, such as running, swimming and yoga, although with each passing year, my body seems to creak a little more loudly. I also enjoy spending time in nature, by hiking and visiting national parks and forests.

Location

I live in Bengaluru, but travel often to Mumbai, where I grew up and was based for the bulk of my career, and to Chennai, where my parents live. I love all three cities, even if each one drives me nuts in its own way. I love spending time in Delhi too, cough, cough, to meet friends, partake of its vibrant cultural life and visit its splendid monuments, and I relish visiting Pune, because it probably has the most khayal singers per square kilometre of anywhere in the world. Bengalis, don’t hound me for leaving out Kolkata. I have visited it only a few times, for short stays. But I thoroughly enjoyed my most recent stay there, eating well and reconnecting with old friends, and I hope to go there more often. In other words, despite India’s myriad problems, especially Hindu supremacism’s grip on power, I revel in the country’s cultural diversity, rich performing arts traditions, superb textiles, varied flora and fauna, mighty mountains, delectable food and human warmth, among other virtues. Above all, it is home. As a journalist and writer, India as a subject endlessly fascinates me. As a citizen, I like to think that I have a pan-Indian outlook, if not sensibility.

Some personal information

I am married to Jaikumar Radhakrishnan, a theoretical computer scientist. We are the parents of twins: Ritvik Ramanan Radhakrishnan, who is a graduate student in mathematics, and Samhita Ramanan Radhakrishnan, a graduate student in computational biology. No, I don’t have a T-shirt that says ‘I survived being the parent of twins’ — because parenting never ends! More seriously, while parenting twins had its challenges in the early stages, it has been a deeply satisfying and rewarding part of my life. My father is S. Ramanan, a mathematician, and my mother, Anuradha Ramanan, is a former librarian who has translated non-fiction from English to Tamil. My sister, Kavita Ramanan, is an applied mathematician. We are thus all involved in one way or another with mathematics or writing. We are all also avid fans of at least one genre of music.